One of my students from last semester dropped by my office today to give me this gift. I’m truly blessed with amazing students. Thankful everyday that I get to share my love of economics with them.

Core inflation remained relatively subdued, but headline shocks, strong demand, and a tight labor market complicate the outlook for monetary policy. cc: @BryanPCutsinger thedailyeconomy.org/article/…

The seen: fewer pesticides in farming. The unseen: higher food prices, falling real incomes, and a diet shift toward instant noodles. @BryanPCutsinger price theory puzzle makes the unseen visible. econlib.org/econlog/econlog-…

There is a new Fed chair and potentially a new vision for the next Fed framework review. I hope it includes a review of the Fed's operating system. But if it, again, only looks at the inflation target, here are some lessons learned from the 2025 framework review.

Will the Fed learn the right lessons from the Fed Framework Review? @BryanPCutsinger, @PIrelandEcon, and @WilliamJLuther discuss with @DavidBeckworth the big takeaways from the 2025 Fed Framework Review, the flip flopping of FIT to FAIT and back to FIT, the biggest lessons from the 2020 Fed Framework Review, the case for NGDP Targeting at the Fed, hope for future reviews, and much more. youtu.be/fHCDTK3cyQQ?si=A2CM…

Exactly one month from today, the United States turns 250. To mark it, the Penn Initiative for the Study of Markets @Penn_Exchange is offering a free online course on the economic foundations of the American Founding. I will lecture on June 23 and July 28, alongside Alan Taylor, Woody Holton, Joseph Wallis, and Jack Rakove, among others. The course follows the story from colonial settlement to the early republic, showing how economics and institutions shaped political choices at every turn: the road to independence, the Revolutionary War, the Constitutional Convention, and the rival visions of Hamilton and Jefferson. This is one of my favorite subjects in economic and legal history. Details and registration here: american-founding.org/

NEW PUBLICATION: "An interest-group theory of AI-tool governance in science", published in Public Choice. In this paper, I analyze one possible rationale for academics wanting to regulate and constrain the use of AI tools in scientific work: their own interest. Some researchers are less able than others to benefit from the new tools and therefore want to make it difficult for their competitors in academia to use them. rdcu.be/fl7PA

Very glad this paper is out in print link.springer.com/article/10…. Will do a thread/substack post at some point!

The best intro comes @JohnHCochrane’s review of Famous First Bubbles.

And again, and again, and again, the market proves to be more flexible and adaptable than the engineers, extrapolating, with their calculators expect. When prices change, behaviour changes. Believe in substitution, in elasticity, in human ingenuity, that is, in the market, and you will get a closer approximation than all doom-mongers. For this of course, a market must exist (e.g., does not apply to the fertility collapse).

New paper with Twitter-less Alex Salter just dropped. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.…

Former BLS commissioner and my former boss, Bill Beach joins the show this week.

New paper with @DAgyemanDuodu just dropped. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.…

I caught Zucman red handed as he did this. By chance, I had downloaded his old datafile before he swapped them. The backlash against him from this discovery prompted him to restore the old files (which were attached to an already-published paper in the QJE). A few weeks later, he released a contrived rationalization of his new approach. That new approach has never gone through peer review, and contains multiple methodological choices that fail the smell test at the most basic levels. Receipts here: philmagness.com/2019/10/some…

Thanks @profgoose for the 🧵& featuring this work with @faubusiness colleague @BryanPCutsinger We find 87.5% of programmatic accreditor-association pairs are legally embedded or identical. In a fresh run of the data this morning, I also find that higher structural entanglement is associated with lower grad rates and higher borrower delinquency. Important context as the committee works through the governance proposals at @usdoegov this week!

Economics graduate programs in decline: new PhD student enrollments down 12.5%, masters enrollment down 17.6%, according to @AEAjournals

April inflation data suggest price pressures are becoming broader and more persistent, reinforcing the Federal Reserve’s cautious stance on interest rates. cc: @BryanPCutsinger thedailyeconomy.org/article/…

Every time I try to log into Editorial Manager…

Price stability is not defined, so the Fed in theory could interpret it as flexible inflation targeting (FIT). Which is what they are currently doing. (1/3)

"Law & Economics" goes beyond the courtroom. In their 1994 paper, Anderson & McChesney took a model of why legal disputes "settle out of court" and used it to explain why relations between frontier settlers and Indian tribes devolved over time. tinyurl.com/mwwbxddv